Just look at the ants

As an amateur gardener, I have mixed feelings about ants. On the one hand, they are admirable in many ways, such as persistence, discipline, and resilience. On the other, they build aphid farms on plants and steal seeds. This last point is the pertinent one today.

Ants in our garden have been stocking up on seeds at an accelerated, as it were, pace over the last few days because winter is approaching. They are building inventories. The EU is the very opposite of ants when it comes to winter preparations. The EU, it appears, is waiting for lower seed, that is gas, prices. And for a magical reversal of the fuel crunch, too. The EU is not like ants at all, except in the aphid farm respect, where they drain businesses of money with climate regulations but you already guessed that.

Let’s start with gas. Inventories are at the lowest since 2011 and nobody seems to be in a rush to change that. The non-rush appears to be especially pronounced in Germany, which Politico — Politico — called “the EU's biggest vulnerability” in terms of gas security, “because its sheer size means gas shortfalls there could be felt in neighboring countries, driving up prices across the bloc if it fails to restore its reserves.” Good to know. What is even better to know is that gas prices are nowhere near as high as they were in 2022. Really good to know this, even if doesn’t matter in the least.